Which Information Helps Resolve Recall Failures for Familiar People's Names?

Personal names are particularly susceptible to retrieval failures. In the present paper, studies describing people’s spontaneous strategies for resolving failures in recalling personal names as well as laboratory studies of experimentally induced resolution of name recall failures are reviewed. The review indicates that people frequently use spontaneous strategies based on a search for structural, semantic, and contextual information about the target person. On the other hand, both cueing and priming experimental studies have shown that providing phonological information may help resolve a recall failure, whereas providing structural or semantic information is usually not helpful. A possible explanation of this discrepancy between the spontaneous use of semantic/contextual information and the experimentally demonstrated uselessness of this kind of information is provided. Finally, the role of syntactical similarity (belonging or not to the same part of speech) in the efficiency of phonological priming is discussed.